What is World Diabetes Day?
World Diabetes Day is every year on November 14, first created in 1991 by the International Diabetes Foundation and the World Health Organization. Diabetes is a chronic disease where the pancreas doesn’t produce enough insulin if any at all. It also leads to serious health conditions and, in many ways, can be preventable. That’s why we take this day to spread awareness and education.
History of World Diabetes Day
Diabetes is considered to have been around 1550 BC. The successful extraction and injection of insulin into humans was discovered in 1922. So, comparatively, our understanding of diabetes is quite new compared to its long, arduous march through history.
The difference between type two and type one started around 1850, where medical professionals at the time believed that they knew enough of the difference between the two to warrant two categories.
Since then, type II diabetes has ballooned to 90 percent of the those affected, with an estimated $425 million individuals affected worldwide. This alarming rise in such a preventable disease is one of the reasons the WHO and IDF wanted to create World Diabetes Day – to help spread awareness of how to prevent contracting the illness.
Having to manage blood sugar levels on a daily basis is a time-consuming and costly endeavor, as the economic cost of diabetes globally is around $727 billion (USD) and in the US alone it costs almost a third of that, at $245 billion.
The costliness and its prevention create even more reason for us to spread awareness of the disease, and also celebrate the birth of the man who helped bring insulin into the modern world as an effective treatment against it.
